The Wall Street Journal’s book club is reading Hilary Mantel’s “Wolf Hall,” which was chosen by our guest host Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray, Love” and “The Signature of All Things.” This week, we’re looking at the way the characters speak in “Wolf Hall.”

Readers, what do you make of the way Hilary Mantel’s characters speak, and how their speech varies in different settings (at home versus in court, for example)?

WSJ: Dialogue can be tough to pull off in historical fiction. It can sound stiff and awkward if it’s too authentic, creating a chasm between the reader and the characters. If it’s too modern, it can be distracting. In “Wolf Hall” Thomas Cromwell is clever and sharp witted and occasionally says things that sound very contemporary, like, “Can’t we drop this?” How do you think Mantel walks the line between creating characters that speak in ways we relate to, and making sure their speech gives readers some sense of the period?

Elizabeth Gilbert: She doesn’t try to write a book that is pretending to have been written in the 16th century. That would be the most irritating book ever written. What she’s done, and it took me two readings to figure it out, she’s written an incredibly contemporary novel that happens to be set in the 16th century.

WSJ: Mantel has described consulting letters from the period, including Cromwell’s own correspondence, and absorbing some of the phrases and patterns of thought and speech, particularly one telling phrase that Cromwell used when he described winning over his opponents “a little and a little.” You also studied letters for your historical novel, “The Signature of All Things.” What can novelists get out of letters that you can’t find in history books or other official documents?

EG: The very best thing that I got was what I got out of letters. What you get is a real human voice. It’s easier for me than [Mantel], because by the 19th century, if you lived in a major Western city and you were a person of thought, you were writing 20 or 30 letters a day, the way that you or I are writing 20 or 30 emails a day. They had four to six mail deliveries a day. It was dialogue. When you’re writing that many letters that fast, you’re not writing them for posterity. Diaries are not even as revealing as letters. You can hear the closest thing we can possibly approximate to what peoples voices sound like. You’re essentially overhearing a conversation. That’s where I got my dialogue.